Menu principale

A European New Tech Initiative

Every day, it becomes more evident that 2014 will be a decisive year, for Europe, under several points of view, but especially as concerns Europe’s relationships with new technologies.
Let’s recall, inter alia:

AS TO EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS:

European Elections;

the “Italian Semester;

the reactions to the proposals of Commissioner Reding, to set up “a European Intelligence”;

the adoption of the concrete financing decisions for the European Programs Culture and Horizon 2020;

the report of the European research institutes about: (i) the outputs of the European “Project RoboLaw”, intended for setting forth the bases of European guidelines about robotics;(ii) of the Regulation on the Protection of Sensitive Dates;(iii)of the negotiations about the “Safe Harbor Agreement”; the report of the Council of Europe about digital investigative techniques;

the report of the Council of Europe on digital investigation techniques.

the expected closing of EU antitrust investigation against Google;

the expected entrance into force of the resolution of the United Nations, supported, inter alia, by Germany, intended to condemn international digital espionage.

the Italian proposal of a so-called “Google tax”;

AS TO TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS:

the entrance into operation in the States (also thanks to the actual opening of the new huge servers in Salt Lake City) of the projects BIG DATA, BRAIN and DIGITAL FRIEND. These projects converge upon a sole tendency (“POSTHUMANISM”), having, as its declared purpose, to impact in an irreversible way the very ontological structure of Humankind;

the finalization of negotiations between USA and UE of a negotiating “PACKAGE” including, inter alia:
(a) the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (“TTIP”) and the Agreement on the Protection of Europeans Sensitive Data (“DPA”);
(b)the proposed coordination of the agreements between USA and each Member State;

IN WORLD ECONOMY:

The entering of China into worldwide economy as a leading producer in many top technological sectors, such as computers, armaments, web, railways, new energies, as well as into large scale movie industries;

the overcoming, by Yuan, on Euro,of Alibaba over Amazon and Google together, and by Naver, Yandex and Baidu, of Google, on their respective markets;

the re-localisation into the US and Japan of several “traditional” productions;

the absence of a clear-cut response of Europe in the new international division of work;

the negotiation, announced at the Beijing EU-China Summit, of a Commercial EU-China Treaty, parallel to the TIPP(both collectively defined as “the Free Trade Agreements”);

the follow-up of the Dubai Resolutions of ITU about ICANN and Cybersecurity;

the tentative, by IETF, to re-project the Web for rendering it safer.

Already this list of problems to be addressed urgently shows the urgency of a European leadership, which, unfortunately, seems to be lacking, as denounced, inter alia, by Fischer and Schmidt in their recent interview to Die Zeit.
Apparently, the decisive element of all these evolutions seems to be the Euro-American dispute following to DATAGATE, which, as a matter of fact, has triggered this accrued interest from European politicians and public opinion for new information technologies. According to us, the real driver is, on the contrary, a scientist project ( “the SINGULARITY”, whose pillars are “BIG DATA”, “DIGITAL FRIENDS” and “BRAIN”): “The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence that will radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself”, by accelerating to the maximum extent the ongoing transfer of the typical human characteristics (reasoning, working, deciding, creating, ordering, cooperating, communicating, remembering), from Mankind to a centralized and digitalized man-made world (algorithms, central servers, clouds, reverse engineering, Digital-Military Complex, robots, drones, etc…-what Manuel de Landa has called “a Transfusion without Bloodshed”).
The link between SINGULARITY and DATAGATE is given by the interexchange of ideologies, technologies, leaders and organizations, between the “post-humanistic” lobby pursuing Singularity and the top levels of politics and intelligence
These evolutions have rendered obsolete many of the past debates, such as the ones about “Development” and about “Bioethics”, because, in front of a world dominated by Artificial Intelligence and robots, “The End of History” and “the End of Man” are becoming more and more synonymous. Thus, the place of Bioethics is taken by “Computer Ethics” and “Roboethics.
In consideration of the above scenario, we are trying here to link, for the first time, into a systematic approach, in this Program, three themes which are only apparently in contradiction, but which, in the political and media discourse, are just now starting to be read together

the understanding and the rationalization of the large number of actions undertaken by Europeans for the protection of their own privacy;

a new proposal for the International Control of New Technologies;

a European Policy for the same, with a special regard for the creation of a EUROPEAN WEB.

As appropriately observed by the European Commissioners Reding (Legal) and Barnier (Internal Market), both possible candidates as Chairman of the Commission), only a strong European power, able to master, on its own territory, the new technologies, will be taken seriously by world powers in the ongoing international negotiations about the same. Also for ITC, it goes without saying that Europe does not take any relevant position, as anybody would expect in consideration of its scale an of its GNP .First of all, as has observed somebody within the EU delegation coming back from Washington, in order to really stop espionage against Europeans, it would be necessary to create nothing less than a –presently absent-, EUROPEAN WEB (or to heavily influence the current activities inside the international ITC community). In fact, each time we make a telephone call, it is registered at least via an Echelon listening center, or an interception room of the provider. Moreover, if we surf in the Web or send a email, our data will be recorded, at least for ranking and geolocalisation purposes, also by the search engine, which can resell it to a commercial company or to an intelligence service.
The evolutions we are facing now, having an impact on the very survival of Humankind, cannot be understood, as it had been tried up to now, via purely sectorial approaches, but, on the contrary, only by an overall revitalization of the “PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE”, which is at the core of the main present international rules. Europe had played, up to now, the leading role in fostering this PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE at international level, as in the cases of the Kyoto Protocols, of OGM, of Echelon, of the reform of the World Telecommunications Organization and of privacy, going up to issuing a UE Communication about the Precautionary Principle ), and financing projects for its practical implementation. Unfortunately, all these battles have ended, at the end of the day, with a complete failure. As a consequence, Europe should give now a new, more motivated and stronger, impulse to its battle, taking into account the news, good or bad, which DATAGATE and SINGULARITY convey to us, and inserting this into an organic and proactive vision, also AS A LEVERAGE FOR A NEW EUROPEACULTURE AND POLITICS.
The urgency of this program of a European Initiative for New Technologies was born, among some subjects of Civil Society, in consideration of the burning urgency of the matter. It should consist, initially, of two meetings and of one document. Their objective would be to give a start, in Europe, to a form of permanent coordination on these themes, even if with a different “national” characterization and with a partially different object) of the American movement “STOP WATCHING US”. All of this brings about the need of an all-encompassing re-thinking of European policies towards new technologies, having an impact on several areas of Europe’s life: (i) international law; (ii) international organizations; (iii) Euro-American relations; (iv) European Treaties and legal order;(vi) European economy (vi) high tech industries; (vii) industrial, foreign and defense policies; (viii) cultural policies; (ix) the Finance of Europe; (x) Antitrust.